blogged to you by Noëlle McAfee

Tag: facebook

1. It’s odd that no one paid attention to the adjective “wise” in Sotomayor’s comment, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.” If “wise” means anything, then all she said was a tautology.

2. It’s good that some companies are making a profit, but obscene that they’ll be handing out huge bonuses.

3. The Wall Street Journal increasingly looks like USA Today.

4. The steadiest ritual in my life, for more than 20 years, is morning with the New York Times and a cup of French roast coffee and this makes life very good indeed. I don’t think it would be the same with an online version.

5. The social effects of Facebook have yet to be seen.

6. Twitter is the anti-Facebook. Where Facebook is about creating a tight circle of friends, however big, Twitter is all about broadcast with a big disconnect between who one follows and who follows you.

7. It’s not as hot this summer as it was last summer, but then again I don’t live in Texas anymore.

8. Did California ever repeal Proposition 13? Now would be a good time.

9. We want Sen. Franken to be funny, not boring.

10. And that’s the way it is, so far, in some measures, this summer of 2009.

I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, in to Tweeterland, the twitter.com site that gives one an entire 140 characters to make any given statement. It was bad enough starting to blog where the attention span rarely runs over two paragraphs. It got worse with Facebook with the short updates allowed to friends. But one sense that these friends had a handle on who one is. My twitter guides tell me to let in all comers, and here I have only 140 words. The good news is that I can embed a link to a blog or a book website, so that perhaps I can lure people into a denser network of ideas. I worry that in between the “whatever” mindset intervenes. What’s become of thinking?

Over the weekend I have become fascinated by the social networking site, Facebook. I week ago, I lumped it together with My Space, as a realm a respectable professinal, especially a professor, would never deign to enter. It’s one thing to blog; it’s another thing to have one’s profile out there for all to see. But is it?

Last week at a meeting I spent some time with a long-time acquaintance and now friend, Taylor Willingham, who runs Texas Forums and works closely with the LBJ library and the rest of the library system. She’s one of the most brilliant civic entrepreneurs I know. She start talking up Facebook and I started quizzing her: why would anyone want to do this, blah, blah, blah. By the end of the night, way past my bedtime, I decided to check it out. A few days later I went to the site, and against my better judgment offered up the contents of my address book, and it tells me who all of my friends are on facebook. It’s stunning. It’s a hell of a lot of people. Very few of my academic friends, but very very many who are involved in public issues, public media, and public policy. So I click to start inviting some of them to my circle of friends. This is weird. “Will you be my friend?” I never utter that, but I invite them with other words. And they respond. And suddenly I have this whole other facebook world.

It’s strange to go to someone’s Facebook site, someone I know and who I know is widely admired, and see that in facebook land someone “has no friends.” That’s a person who joined on a whim and never bothered to follow up, forgot about it. and is now listed as friendless. There is clearly something awful happening here to the very concept of friendship. It can easily become about who I’d like to be seen and known as being friends with rather than who I’d like to have a cup of coffee with or invite to take part in my next project.

But not really. I find out about what my past acquaintance and now facebook friend, Mark Sandell, is thinking about as he produces BBC’s World Have Your Say. I find out that someone I admire who runs a major production company has just had a pedicure. I learn that another colleague in public media is jetting off to Japan. Another colleague is at the optometrist’s office. This is cool.

When people go on these sites there’s a deep pull to pull away from the professional persona, to show a little bit more spark. There’s the picture of a think tank leader with Jimmy Carter, but he’s grinning like crazy. There’s my intellectual friend with her new baby. The other with his dog. This morning’s paper warned about the soft and blurry line between professional and personal personae, waking up to find that your colleagues knew what you were doing the night before. This problem calls for better management. Watch the lines, but don’t mind them too strictly. Don’t let the world know how smashed you got the other night. Do let them know about your intellectual pursuits. But it can’t be entirely the latter. Otherwise you’ll come off as a suit in a world of blue jeans.